


The Devil Rose; The Angel Fell

by mollymauks



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Circus Family, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Other, prompt fills
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-03 16:28:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14000070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mollymauks/pseuds/mollymauks
Summary: Collection of Molly/Yasha fics from prompts on tumblr!1)- Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.2)- Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.





	1. Windows of the Soul

Eyes told you a lot about a person, in Molly’s experience. 

He watched them all day, as he flipped cards between his fingers, plucking on the strings of fate with each twitch of them, tossing destiny onto a rain-damp, ragged blanket with a hole in the bottom near his knee. 

He saw a different thing in each pair. 

The bright blue of innocent youth, who wished to be filled with hope and dreams. 

The sullen brown, who did not believe in this kind of bullshit he peddled, but came anyway, to pass the time, and for the barest chance of scraping a shred of a  _something_  from the dirt of their existence.

 The hollow green, weathered and old, not seeking hope but truth, of the dark, lonely kind they expected. 

The wistful hazel, already stuffed with dreams and ideals, looking to him for gentle guidance and reassurance that their path was set, and that good things would follow where they led. 

He watched the light spark in them when he got it right. Watched it die when he read them wrongly. He spun his cards and his tales and his patter with a flair he suspected he’d been born to. Not everyone could handle the future with such a casual air. Not many could cradle the fragile hope of a weary heart in their hands and not snuff it out like a stuttering candle. 

Molly had seen many eyes settle themselves opposite him at his small booth to the side of the carnival tent. 

It was not until the day he saw a pair that was not a pair at all - one that altered green to blue, depending on the light, the other a striking violet - that he saw ones that looked like his. 

For six months, Molly had looked into mirrors, into the red fathoms of his own eyes, and wondered what he saw there. It had taken Yasha before he understood. 

He saw nothing. He saw a hollowness that only came with those haunted by things too terrible to bear, too monstrous to name. 

There was no home in those eyes. No love. No place. No purpose. They were the eyes of the adrift. The eyes of those so lost they would not know their way should they chance upon it again. The eyes of the forgotten, the abandoned, the forsaken. 

Perhaps that was why, when they passed her on the road, Molly found his voice for her. 

He had only managed odd words in the week before they saw her, and mostly made do with the rough signs his band of merry misfits had created with him, but something in her sparked something in him, and all the demons of the Nine Hells couldn’t have kept him silent.  

“She comes with us,” he’d said, his voice cracked and hoarse from disuse. 

The others had paused. Glanced at each other. Then at the shattered, silent, staring spectre of the woman on the ground before them. 

Molly had ignored them. 

He had jumped down from the wagon he’d been travelling in. He could still remember the way the frozen rain in the mud he had landed in had sloshed into his boots. He had walked to her, and simply held out a hand, wordless, wondering if she would know what he offered. 

She had raised her head, stared at him through long, matted, braided hair, and met his eyes.

In them, she too must have recognised a kindred spirit, and understood that his red eyes, burning like the hell they had both known too much of, offered the only salvation she was like to rip from this world. 

She had taken his hand. He had pulled her to her feet. And they had become lost together. 


	2. In The Shattered Silence

The darkness came to her in her dreams. The crushing, silent, endless darkness. 

She knew the source of the screams that drew the others from their beds at night. Toya wept for the terror she felt again, alone and lost on the streets. Bo relived in the lives he’d taken in war, their restless ghosts finding peace on the other side, but his own remained to torment him. Orna felt the sting of a lover’s wakened fury. And Molly…Molly had demons of the nameless, faceless sort. The ones that could at once be everything, and nothing. 

They were all running from something. Hiding from something. Hiding from someone. In most cases it was themselves. 

But tonight it was Yasha who woke in a cold sweat, chest heaving, eyes glazed. But she didn’t hear screams, or see slashes of blood, or feel stings of pain across a quiet, peaceful body. She saw nothing. She felt nothing. She  _remembered_  nothing of what her mind had just conjured for her. But she felt it. 

In the dim light of her tent the only thing she could sense was her own heartbeat, and it consumed all else. She could feel it battering against her chest like a ram, trying to break open the caging doors of her ribs and make its bid for freedom. She could hear the blood it churned inside her body like a restless sea thundering in her ears. She could see dark shadows at the edges of her vision that pulsed in time with the cacophonous drumbeat inside her chest. She could taste bile. She could smell the fear that licked at her insides without source or direction and she hated it all. 

There was nothing else to anchor her here. There was nothing to fight in the darkness. She could draw her sword against an enemy. She could draw her will against a solid nightmare. She could draw her reason against an apparition. But against this she had nothing, nothing,  _nothing_. And she wanted to fight. She wanted to rage. She wanted to rend apart the world with her fury for doing  _this_ to her. Not least because she didn’t know what  _this_  was. 

A soft shuffle of movement to her left finally snapped her back into action. 

With a low snarl, she drew her blade from where it rested beside her bed and pointed it into the swelling darkness that seemed to be condensing in that spot inches from the tip of her blade, pulsing and solidifying into- 

A pair of red eyes gleamed in the sudden flare of light from a lit candle. 

Yasha closed her eyes and seemed to breathe for the first time since waking. 

“Yash.” Molly’s voice was soft but firm, and the slight pressure on the tip of her blade made her realise it was still hovering inches from his throat. 

She grunted a wordless apology at him then carefully set it down. 

Now that the world around her had been lit with the faint glow of Molly’s candle, it was obvious how much her hand shook. 

She would have hoped that he hadn’t noticed, but she wasn’t stupid, and nor was he. And, when it came to Mollymauk, she didn’t much care. He could see her vulnerable, and broken, and for some reason, that had never broken her any more in the way it had with all the others before him. Perhaps that was because their battered hearts beat in tandem in this moment, and she could see understanding stirring in the depths of his scarlet eyes as surely as she could see beads of sweat dotting his forehead. 

The two of them had been sharing a tent since Yasha had arrived with the circus some four months earlier. 

At first it had been because he had been the one to speak up for her, to put a few quiet words in Gustav’s ear and encourage him to take her on, and so she had become ‘his responsibility, his problem’ like a poorly tempered stallion they had come across on the road. 

When she had started to find herself, and her fire, again, it had been because he was the only one who could get anywhere near her without her wanting to rip their face off with her nails. 

Then it had been because he was her friend, and neither of them would have had it any other way. 

The irony of it was not lost on her. The fact that the closest person to her in the world at this moment was a tiefling filled her, as it filled him, with an ironic amusement. The angels and demons of their ancestors would likely have been appalled by it. But in the moment, she only smiled at him. 

He reached out and held out his hand to her. A wordless offer, free from strings or expectation, he extended entirely for her comfort, and none of his own. Molly didn’t hold to the same bullshit most people did. He wouldn’t take offence if she rejected him in this moment and asked to be alone, because he understood her, and she him. 

She took his hand, their fingers lacing together, providing her a solid port in the storm that had tossed her from her slumber. Then she made a quick, deft sign towards him with her free hand. 

The others whispered that when Molly had first arrived with them, he hadn’t spoken a word to any of them for months. He hadn’t been able to. Toya said that she had helped him, that they had helped each other, but it had taken him a long time. Even now, he still sometimes went even days, and once well over a week, where he was unable to produce a sound. 

They all knew it, but none of the others had really found a way of helping him communicate. Molly could read and write, but few of the others could, only Orna and Gustav, before she had come to them, and it wasn’t practical, or financially possible in a lot of cases, for him to write down anything he wanted to say. 

That had grated on her, that they were all willing to leave him in that isolating darkness. As they had started to get closer, she had worked with him to develop a rough sort of sign language that he could use when his voice left him. She had adapted it from battlefield hand signals that she had been taught during her training, and it had blossomed into something that resembled a crude language between them as it had evolved through their use of it together. 

Molly understood exactly what she needed from him, even though she couldn’t say the words. 

With a quiet nod, he carefully set down his candle, making sure it stayed lit. Then he carefully shifted until he was sitting beside her. He raised an arm and gently put it around her shoulders, and she leaned her head against him, feeling the sudden crushing wave of exhaustion that always followed an adrenaline rush crashing into her. 

Molly pressed a gentle kiss to the side of her head. Then he held her. Just held her. She closed her eyes and breathed, and listened, until the smooth, steady rhythm of his own heartbeat finally drowned out her own. 

After a long time, when the candle had begun to burn so low he had to move away from her to light another, he settled beside her again with a small wooden case in his hand, and an enquiring look on his face. 

With a  few simple signs, she acknowledged what he wanted, and agreed it would probably help both of them. He smiled, and she was struck with how nice it felt to be able to share such an intimate moment with someone without having to utter a sound. Too often the world was too loud, and words shared between even the best of friends too fraught with double-meaning and confusion. This stripped, raw way the two of them communicated was one of the greatest blessings the Storm Lord had ever bestowed upon her. 

Molly sat himself down beside her, his tail casually curling around her waist, and she watched his deft hands as he began to unpack his little case. It had taken him weeks to save up the money for it, and he had been like a child on solstice day when he had come bounding into their tent practically foaming at the mouth with excitement in order to show her what he had bought. 

Inside the small case were a number of paintbrushes, some of them so fine and thin it was like painting with a pin head whenever he used it for detail work. The rest of the space was devoted to the paints that he had made for himself. 

From the depths of his cloak he produced the half-finished deck of cards he had been working on since he had bought this. He told Gustav, and Orna, and anyone else who asked that it was simply an investment, another way for them to make money. But she knew the truth. She had seen the blend of peace and joy that in his eyes when he painted, the sense of calm purpose that radiated from him whenever he raised a brush. 

She liked to watch him work. She was not artistically inclined herself, was not concerned with anything creative at all, unless it included creating a corpse. Molly loved to sing, and she suspected he could play if he ever managed to get his hands on the right instrument, and he painted beautifully. Even though she had watched him make each one, she still felt she could stare at them for hours and be lost in all the details he included. 

Careful not to disturb him, she rested her head on his shoulder and quietly watched him work. His tail began idly stroking her side in a slow, rhythmic, pulsing movement that was strangely soothing, and she leaned into him a little more. 

The longer he worked on this card, the more it seemed to look like her. The background showed the head of a snarling wolf, but over it was a woman, standing tall and proud, with pale skin, and braided hair that turned slowly from black to white as it tumbled past her shoulders. 

She glanced at Molly several times, but he deliberately avoided her gaze, intent on his work. 

She looked back down too. Now that he had finished, there was no mistaking it to be her. He set down the brush he had been using for the fine details and took up another, which he dipped into his black paint. 

Above the top of the card, in beautiful glyphs, he wrote the single word: STRENGTH. 

She blinked. Unable to stop staring down at the card. When she raised her eyes again, she found Molly watching her, a soft smile on his lips. 

He kissed her head, and told her he would stay here with her while she slept. She kissed his cheek in return, and lay back down, no longer afraid of the darkness that beckoned while Molly’s soft light continued to flicker gently beside her. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!!! Their friendship ruins me tbh, and I would die for both of them.


End file.
